Three years after her heartbreaking memoir saw her shoot to international fame, a Cambridge author is taking to the small screen.

Helen Macdonald won the 2014 Costa Book Award and the Samuel Johnson Prize for H is for Hawk, which details how her relationship with a goshawk called Mabel helped her overcome the grief of her father’s death.

Now, 10 years since her father Alisdair Macdonald died, and five since her beloved Mabel’s death, she is returning to the world of goshawks for a new prime time BBC documentary.

H is for Hawk: A New Chapter will see the author, who was a research fellow at Cambridge’s Jesus College, return to the city to train a new hawk.

Helen Macdonald's Costa Book Award-winning memoir H is for Hawk

“This is the raging wild challenge of my future,” she said.

“A hawk that won’t be a solution to grief, but my wings to somewhere new.”

Almost extinct in the UK, one of the handful of times Helen had ever seen a wild goshawk was a spring morning a few weeks before her father’s death.

Now, as she waits for the chick she’ll train to hatch in an aviary, she sets out into the forest to find goshawks in the wild again.

Helen Macdonald (Image: David Johnson)

As well as scenes filmed at Jesus, the hour-long show sees Helen head to an isolated farmhouse in the north of England, where the chick she’ll train will live with its new owner.

As Helen hides herself away to begin training the new bird, it soon becomes clear that this chick is very different to Mabel - and so begins a process that is, for Helen, at once familiar and strange: the intense process of learning to live with a hawk.

Mabel - the goshawk owned by Helen Macdonald

The show will air on BBC Two next Thursday (October 19), at 9am.

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